Everyone wants to think that they are above the baser things in life – special snowflakes who consume the products of Sunday-night HBO and public radio but hold their pierced noses as they hustle past the true crime section of the indie bookstore. The HBO documentary The Jinx introduced many of those people to Robert Durst for the first time, but there have been half a dozen books about him over the years, in addition to the 2010 film All Good Things, Jinx film-maker Andrew Jarecki’s fictionalized take on Durst. (Its release prompted Durst to reach out to Jarecki, which was reportedly the start of the documentary.)

You – the sneering high brow consumer of strictly artisanal true crime stories – may never have heard of Robert Durst before using your uncle’s HBO GO password to watch it on your MacBook Air, but for God’s sake Ryan Gosling played him in the movie. But even as both the network and the news media has hyped the the show – the New York Times sent a push alert seconds after the final episode and other news organizations covered Durst’s pre-finale arrest and his background (real estate heir! dismembered his neighbor! wife disappeared! best friend murdered!) – critics who squirm whenever anything a little too base floats to the top of the zeitgeist sprang into action.

At Time, Eliana Dockterman cited both The Jinx and the popular podcast Serial, musing that “the burgeoning popularity of this narrative reporting also has critics wondering whether journalists are forsaking ethics for the sake of drama.” At the Boston Globe, Ty Burr asked if we are “are we losing something – and if so, what – when we shape facts to fit a multichapter narrative” for ratings. “Where does journalism end and entertainment begin?” the Columbia Journalism Review asked.

Spare me your hipster intellectualism and hand-wringing. We all may have spilled barrels of digital ink on Serial and The Jinx, but there is absolutely nothing new – or, frankly, all that wrong – about crime narratives serving as popular entertainment. At their very best, they can change lives, convict the guilty and free the innocent... and they have been doing so for centuries.

HBO is no stranger to the genre: its vaunted documentary collection online contains a trilogy – “serialized content” as we’re calling it now, so as not to make it sound like a trashy miniseries – called Paradise Lost, which began in 1996. It’s a documentary investigation into how the young men known as the West Memphis 3 came to be convicted of murder – one sentenced to death – and their eventual release from prison in 2011, thanks in no small part to the publicity generated by the film-makers. The final film was nominated for an Academy Award. Or you could watch The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’ 1988 documentary about a man initially sentenced to death row for the murder of a Texas police officer; the film led to his release and exoneration in 1989. Morris won a Macarthur genius award for it. There’s also 1992’s The Ice Man Tapes, a two-part documentary from HBO Films in which mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski stares into a camera and speaks in great, horrifying detail about the more than 100 murders he committed.

Those are just the “classier”, high production value entries in a genre with which I first became acquainted in the 90s from shows like Forensic Files, City Confidential, and Cold Case Files. A&E eventually ran them all in blocks (sometimes right after Murder, She Wrote re-runs); in Cold Case Files, for example, narrator Bill Kurtis’s soothing voice read out the details of some egregious crime that was sometimes solved in an hour or a half-hour ... or sometimes not. They were voyeuristic, and often fairly gory, but they aren’t essentially different from The Jinx and Serial in anything but the kind of people who are watching.

Nothing about the genre is essentially new: as writer Bill James pointed out in the 2011 book Popular Crime, “The modern American phenomenon of popular crime stories is in absolutely no way new, modern, or American.” From the Bible to Lizzie Borden, and from literary true crime like In Cold Blood to trashy reads like Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, there’s always been a divide in the true crime stories the supposedly erudite consider worthy of their attention and those supposedly meant to appeal to the baser nature of the masses.

What divides the two? I have a theory: in the modern age, true crime stories only approach art when their external narrators have the right, hipster-approvedeyewear. Jessica Fletcher’s moment is coming, I can feel it.